Gilded Chicken, that is. This caused some amusing comment on the Stormvale mailing list when the menu got posted without descriptions of the recipes. Was I really going to gold leaf a chicken? What will that crazy Balian do next?
No gold leaf is involved. This is actually a simple roast chicken dish, and the gilding is a mixture of egg yolk and saffron brushed on during the latter part of roasting to give it a golden color. This recipe is from Pleyn Delit, perhaps my favorite medieval cookbook. It is very likely that if price issues cause me to punt and prefer chicken legs and breasts and thighs instead, this will work just as well, but the roast chickens will look better, of course.
Update: Tonight I cooked this dish for the first time, with a nice 5-lb. roaster that is probably a little bigger than ideal. It seems to work well, although I had a misstep - I couldn't find a brush at the last minute, so coverage of the "gilding" wasn't very even. But it looked pretty good. I may try it on individual pieces to see how that looks, too. That would be less impressive but likely more cost effective, as I noted above.
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